Garment parts such as collars, cuffs, facings or pocket flaps are often made of heavier or stiffer fabric construction than the remainder of the garment in order to improve the appearance of the garment as well as to increase wrinkle resistance. Often these parts are made from two or more separate layers of a shell fabric material which are lined with a separate inner lining joined together to form the individual garment part.
Current manufacturing processes for making such garment parts include sandwiching an inner lining layer between two outer layers of shell fabric and joining the two outer layers of shell fabric together about their peripheries by sewing or tacking as shown in FIG. 1 of the drawings. A further process as shown in FIG. 2 of the drawings involves fusing a layer of lining material to either the top or bottom outer shell fabric layer after which the two shell fabric layers are joined together around their peripheries by sewing or tacking.
Both of the forementioned current processes present problems because the separate layers of material used in the construction of the individual garment part usually have different physical properties in terms of fabric content, fiber construction, density, shrinkage and stress characteristics, and sewability.
The first mentioned process of attaching all three layers together by sewing around the peripheries of the different layers forming the part involves leaving an open unjoined portion of the periphery which is later joined to the garment. Often the inner lining layer has different stretch-shrinkage characteristics than that of the outer layers of shell fabric such that during washing and drying of the garment, the difference in the stretch-shrinking properties results in a wrinkled or misshapen garment part. In addition the sewing method of joining the layers together may cause puckering or a change in part dimension as a result of the sewing process. This is because different layers of the garmant part may react differently to the feed mechanism of a sewing machine, to the tension applied to the individual layers during the sewing process, to the needle heat generated by the needle penetrating the multilayers of fabric and to the particular thread-type used.
The method of fusing a fusible inner lining to one of the outer shell fabrics as outlined in the second process described above does not overcome all of the problems associated with the first described process since the shrink-stretch characteristics of the inner lining may differ from the shrink-stretch characteristics of the other layer of shell fabric to which it is not fused. Further since the same sewing methods are used as in the first mentioned process, the same problems of puckering may still occur. The second process does result in some improvement in that the inner lining between the two outer shell fabrics is affixed throughout to one of the shell fabrics thus minimizing some difference in shrinkage and stretch co-efficient since there are only two parts of the garment part which are movable with respect to each other rather than three as in the first described process.
It is therefore an object of my invention to provide for a multi-layer fabric construction which neutralizes the difference in shrink and stretch co-efficients between the individual layers of fabric and which at the same time improves sewability of the various layers.